100 Amazing Facts about the Negro

100 Amazing Facts About the Negro With Complete Proof: A Short Cut to the World History of the Negro

J.A. Rogers devoted over fifty years of his life to his research. He had not only looked at world history but also at the histor of people of African origin, and has show how their history is an inseparable part of the history of mankind.

I don’t think that Rogers’ work was assigned reading in the course, but hungry to learn about “the Black Experience,” as we called it at the time, I essentially bought most, if not all, of the books in the Yale Co-op’s Black Studies section. Among those titles, the works of Rogers were especially fascinating for their range of the author’s ambition and imagination, such as his pioneering analysis of Sex and Race, published in three volumes between 1941 and 1944, and his fascinating biographical dictionary The World’s Great Men of Color, published in 1946 and 1947 in two large volumes.

If America hadn’t already invented the “one-drop rule” by this time, Rogers most probably would have. He seems to have had some sort of miscegenation-meter, which he used to “out” all sorts of “white” people as having black ancestry. And while he erred on the side of excess as he peered into the proverbial woodpile, Rogers got it right an impressive amount of the time, especially considering when he was publishing his work. (At the other end of his collected works, though, stands The Five Negro Presidents, which, shall we say, would get the “Black History Wishful Thinking Prize,” hands down, were there such in existence).

Rogers was a self-educated man, by and large. According to his wife, Helga, his father was a schoolteacher and a Methodist minister in Jamaica, before becoming the manager of “a large plantation.” Joel Rogers served in the British army in the Royal Garrison Artillery in Port Royal, Jamaica, then migrated to the United States in 1906. According to his biographer, Thabiti Asukile, he enrolled in the Chicago Art Institute in 1909, supporting himself as a Pullman porter during the summers between 1909 and 1919. In 1921, Rogers moved to Harlem, met and became friends with both Hubert Harrison, the West Indian radical activist and writer, and the African-American journalist and novelist George S. Schuyler.

Rogers was soon launched on a path that would make him one of the leading black journalists of his generation. Rogers wrote regularly for the Pittsburgh Courier, the New York Amsterdam News, and the Chicago Defender, and he contributed several important essays to A. Philip Randolph’s radical-socialist Messenger Magazine during the Harlem Renaissance. (He also wrote the only essay on that emerging art form called “jazz” in Alain Locke’s seminal 1925 anthology The New Negro). But the triumph of his career as a journalist, without a doubt, was his coverage of events in Ethiopia. The Courier sent Rogers — the only African-American journalist on the ground — there to cover the Italian occupation of Ethiopia (1935-1936), including an interview with Emperor Haile Selassie, whose coronation Rogers had also attended in 1930.

Rogers worked for the Courier from 1921 to 1966. In 1934, the same year in which he published100 Amazing Facts About the Negro, he began publishing a weekly column titled “Your History,” which he retitled “Facts About the Negro” in 1962.

I have been thinking about Joel A. Rogers quite a lot recently, as I start to film our newest PBS series. It’s the first attempt, we believe, to document the entire sweep of African-American history from the beginnings of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the early years of the 16th century to the election (and we hope the re-election) of the nation’s first black president — 500 years of the history of the African presence in the New World. The six-part series, called The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, is scheduled to air in the fall of 2013, exactly 500 years after the first documented black man, who happens to have been free, landed in what is now the state of Florida. (But more on him in a later column!).